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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese men are worrying about more than mere sweat as summer temperatures rise: talk of body odour caused by ageing is adding to anxiety in a land that prizes being squeaky clean.

Being Japan, it has also sparked a range of new products, from odour-eating suits to special chewing gum.

"My wife tells me that I stink," said company manager Atsushi Asami, 47, interviewed on a typically hot and humid Tokyo street. "I am concerned about ageing odour and know there are anti-ageing odour products, but have not bought them myself."

An on-line survey by CBIC, a Tokyo-based company that sells deodorant products, found that 89 percent of 700 Japanese women in their 20s and 30s found men smelly in commuter trains.

Shiseido Research Centre, a laboratory affiliated with Japanese cosmetics maker Shiseido, sparked the trend to anti-odour products for older men when it discovered eight years ago a substance that it named "kareishu", or ageing odour.

The lab identified nonenal, a type of fatty acid, as the cause, saying unsaturated fatty acids and oxidative decomposition increase from around 40 years of age.

"Increasingly, people are becoming concerned about their body odour," said Tsuneaki Gomi, a plastic surgeon who runs a clinic on body odour in Tokyo.

"Japan is becoming more of a cleanliness and odourless society. And the name, kareishu, fits right in with that trend of the times," Gomi said.

You'd think that people so obsessed with bathing would have discovered antiperspirant.

As I remember they,the Japanese, use some sort of cinnamon scented salve under the arms after the hot tubs.
The ordor they are referring too is unique to older men and isn't exactly from a lack of bathing !
Old men have an unique Odor that comes with aging.My Grandfather and a few older uncles
smelled of aging.Older woman don't seem to smell of old age but that could be because of
perfumes or soaps they all use.